The Dutch Girl by Donna Thorland Page A

classical. But they aren’t. They’ve got a medieval soul that sash windows and dentil moldings can never banish. You loved the house anyway because although you were raised on reason, you have a romantic nature, and you whiled away hours holed up in that maze of tiny, irregular rooms, lost in the pages of a novel. How am I doing so far?”
    He was a natural born raconteur, a lover of words, and she had listened to his flights of fancy for hours in the barn, sometimes adding her own embellishments. He’d made up a plausible background for the woman she presented herself as, for the woman she had become. “It was a very good story,” she said truthfully. “I like it better than my own.”
    Her own was as much a work of fiction as his. The only difference was that it was not a spur-of-the-moment invention. She had been telling it for years. It had notseemed so sad and gray before she heard Gerrit’s version.
    â€œMy father was a surveyor,” she recited. “He was away from home a great deal and often traveled in inclement weather. He caught a chill while working in the backcountry and died. My mother succumbed to grief shortly thereafter. The estate passed to my brothers, who my parents expected to provide me with a good portion, but whose wives persuaded them against settling enough on me to make a good marriage. My options were become the unpaid governess to my nieces and nephews, and housekeeper to my sisters-in-law, or teach. So I taught.”
    â€œDid I at least get the house right?” he asked.
    Anna thought about her real childhood home, the one-room tenant’s cottage with the sleeping attic, built Dutch-style on an H-frame, the two end walls of rough red sandstone, the rest narrow clapboard. There had been no privacy for reading, but then there had been no books save one battered old Statenbijbel. She liked Gerrit’s version of her life better.
    â€œThe house,” she said, thinking of the fantasy in silkwork hanging in her parlor in New York, “was brick.”
    â€œYou don’t sound as though you liked it.”
    â€œI like the house you described better.”
    â€œThen you should have stitched it.”
    â€œBut that one is only a fantasy.”
    â€œNo more so than the Van Haren coat of arms. Do you know its origin?”
    â€œNo. Something to do with knights and swords and services to a king, I expect.”
    â€œHardly. The first patroon was a jeweler. All you needed—provided you knew the right people—one hundred and fifty years ago to be granted a patroonship under the West India Company’s Charter of Rights and Exemptions was to settle fifty persons over the age of fifteen in New Netherland. In other words, all you needed was money. Money to recruit them and pay their passage and supply the basic needs of life for a few years. After that, the land, and the people on it, in effect, belonged to you. A perpetual profit machine powered by human lives. The first patroon of Harenwyck never even set foot in America, but he wasted no time inventing a coat of arms for himself. The heraldry of the Van Harens is purest fantasy—and I can’t help feel its allusions cut rather too close to the bone. If Grietje and Jannetje are going to embroider a fantasy, it might as well be something entirely their own. Not that of a grasping old gem cutter, or, come to that, of my good father and brother.”
    â€œThey won’t be embroidering anything at all,” said Anna, “until someone makes me a new frame.”
    For a second he looked sheepish. Then he said, “Get my box of gold open and you may have a dozen frames.”
    He handed her the collected set of lockpicks. There was just enough room on the floor of the coach for her to crouch beside the strongbox—and discover that it wasfacing the wrong way. It was wedged in tightly between the walls of the coach, with no room to turn, and the side with the lock